Manchester Arena: a massacre used cynically to strengthen the so-called
"sacred union" between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie

Over the past two years, terrorist attacks by militants linked to Islamist
extremism have multiplied. Defining themselves in a number of ways, but
organized mainly by Isis or Al Qaeda, they have generally been classified
into the category of jihadism (jihad = holy war), with religious
roots in the fundamentalist interpretation of Islam.

Why religious roots?

It is now evident that this is a seemingly "noble" justification, not a
"down to earth" one for violent acts presented as a reaction to the much
greater violence of the imperialist powers; as a species of "right of
retaliation" for the "victims "of these attacks. The Capitalist, Christian
and Imperialist West, for its part, has every interest in cataloging
"International Terrorism" as terrorism on an Islamic matrix; It allows
Imperialism to oppose to this "evil" the "good" of a "civilization" which
claims to spread economic and social progress, democracy and peace in the
world ...

Except that this economic and social progress is based on the exploitation
of the human labor force whose slavery, which in the major industrialized
countries is mitigated by the crumbs granted to the masses and masked by the
democratic system, is much more violent and beastial in the less developed
countries, where there is an overabundant labor force to exploit at its
mercy or to throw away as unpurchased commodities.

Why do attacks with the Islamist imprimatur, and years after those of
September 11, 2001 in the United States, now strike in Europe, the cradle of
civilization (the cradle of capitalism, colonialism, imperialism)? Why do
they strike at the place where the factors of economic, technical and
financial progress have been formed and developed, which were then spread to
the whole world – together with all the factors of competition, of struggle
for the conquest of markets, of wars of rape and pillage that have
characterized the world since the anti-feudal revolution put an end to the
domination of absolutism and the old aristocratic classes?

The European countries, which for centuries have plundered and colonized
entire continents, to the detriment of their populations, having accrued the
gigantic advantages by which they were able to construct their economic
expansion, could only be a coveted destination (facilitated by the knowledge
of the language and habits of the former bosses) by the masses of migrants
fleeing the misery, repression and devastation left to their countries by
colonization and bourgeois decolonization. Jealous of their national
"identity" and attached to the privileges that their world domination
guaranteed to a certain extent to the former colonizers – mainly Great
Britain, France and Belgium – the European bourgeoisies have always played a
double game. On the one hand receptivity, insofar as this low-cost
labor power was and still is necessary for their industrial and commercial
companies; on the other hand, repression against unwanted immigration
deemed unnecessary and treated as "clandestine". Somewhat similarly to the
enduring situation of the black populationin the United States, African, Middle Eastern and Eastern immigrants
have never really been "integrated" into the countries where by force or by
chance they have established themselves. Not because they would not abandon
the culture, habits and customs of their countries of origin to adopt those
of the country where they live, but because capitalism, the dominant mode of
production, with all its contradictions and its social antagonisms is based
on division and not on union, on domination and not on equality, on war and
not on peace. The division into antagonistic classes is not an invention of
Marxism, nor a temporary historical situation that could be overcome by
measures of economic, social and diplomatic policy. It is a historical
material condition resulting from capitalism, which can only be overthrown
by a revolution much deeper than that which suppressed feudalism, a
revolution that will be made by the only class in this society which has
nothing to lose but everything to gain: the proletarian class, the class
without reserves, of those who can live only by being exploited under the
conditions imposed by capitalism.

But the fact is that this class, especially in the most wealthy countries,
has been so intoxicated, crushed, and subjugated in a hundred years of
imperialist domination, that it has not yet regained the strength to
recognize itself for what it is, materially and historically: the class
antagonistic par excellence to capitalism, the only one which
possesses a historical task, condensed in the program of revolutionary
communism. This proletariat demonstrated its strength in the nineteenth
century in the revolutionary episodes throughout Europe in 1848 and in the
Paris Commune, in the twentieth century in the Russian Revolution and the
revolutionary movements which in the 1920s attacked the established order
not only in Europe but in Asia. But at the end of a long class war it was
crushed by the counterrevolution, by democratic, pacifist and opportunistic
petty bourgeois influences causing it to lose the genuinely communist
program and transforming its organizations into agents of the bourgeoisie.

Once beaten, the European proletariat was subjected to the policy and
demands of the imperialism of the various countries; the bourgeoisies put in
place the "social shock absorbers" to meet basic needs and, following the
example of fascism, they adopted a policy of class collaboration enshrined
in the law. Their aim was not to improve the plight of their proletarians by
applying the rights that are democratically inscribed in all the
Constitutions, but to make them support capitalism and accept all the
consequences of its economy, including the most disastrous in periods of
crisis and war. The European and American proletarians, and those of other
developed capitalist countries, have been accustomed to defend their
interests, to use the bourgeois political and economic instruments
(elections, parliament, freedom of enterprise, etc.); but also to use them
in the framework of a class collaboration, which goes even beyond the limits
that the old reformism offered to interclassism.

Why did we recall these explanations when writing about the tragedy in
Manchester?

When the antagonism between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie disappears
from the scene (although the bourgeoisie never stops its war against the
proletariat), bourgeois and petit-bourgeois antagonisms appear even more
violent and chaotic. The bourgeoisies are constantly engaged in competition
and struggle; the struggle between competing bourgeois factions within the
same country is also a permanent factor. The action of terrorist groups and
networks occurs within the framework of this constant confrontation within
the competing bourgeois and petty-bourgeois strata, sometimes speaking
peacefully, politically, sometimes violently, including recourse to
criminality; it is the expression of interests opposed to those of the great
States which, by their military interventions, have destroyed the existing
equilibriums; the chaos provoked by the wars sets in motion many local
groups seeking to secure seats of power and to take advantage of the
exploitation of potentially present natural resources, proletarians to
exploit, communication channels to be controlled, etc. ; and these groups
seek to affiliate themselves with certain capitalist or imperialist powers
that hold the purse strings.

It is obvious that the militants of Isis or Al Qaeda need strong ideological
and material motivations – just as do the proletarians mobilized for the
defense of the homeland, of national interests, in peacetime or in war. The
soldiers who went to their massacre during the first or Second World War
received the blessing of the priests to save their souls while they were
going to massacre and to be cannon fodder. So the terrorists we are talking
about receive the blessing of their Imam before going to blow themselves up
to spread terror among their designated enemies.

The difference is that armies in general clash with each other as these
terrorist fighters massacre crowds who are being entertained or trying to
live peacefully in a normal daily life. But these terrorists have an
additional motivation: they respond to the bombing and military
interventions that destroy thousands of lives, men, women and children,
sowing in the heart of the sparkling European metropolises the terror
experienced for years in Fallujah, Tikrit, Mosul, Baghdad, Tripoli, Homs or
in the villages of Afghanistan. The fact that the perpetrators of these
attacks are almost always European citizens of Libyan, Syrian, Iraqi origin,
etc. , second or third generation, demonstrates on the one hand that the
famous "integration" did not take place because in this society equality
does not exist (either between the living or between the dead); and on the
other hand that the persistence of wars and massacres in the former colonies
continues to provoke not only fear and terror, but also the rage and
determination to react by unleashing violence where it will do most damage –
and all the better if they symbolize a lifestyle of insouciance towards the
dramas that are constantly repeating themselves on the margins of opulent
Europe.

We have already said that this type of terrorism has a social and
ideological matrix of the petty-bourgeois type. There remains the fact that
the ruling class finds an additional reason for calling the proletarians to
l’union sacrée, the sacred union, defending Occidental
democracy, culture, traditions and customs, in other words defending the
Western States and a system responsible for all injustices, for all
oppressions, for all wars.

That is why the proletarians must refuse solidarity towards a homeland which
has always used the same terrorist methods as those of the "Islamic
terrorism" groups, but at an unprecedented level and efficiency. In
solidarizing with their capitalists, the proletarians would be only be
supporting the fomenters of the clashes between bourgeois, while turning
their backs on the only way to put an end to oppression and exploitation:
the path of the resumption of the class struggle, independent proletarian
organization for the exclusive defense of their immediate and future class
interests.

The proletarian response is undoubtedly the condemnation of these terrorist
acts, but from a class point of view, that is to say, from the point
of view of organizational, political and ideological independence
vis-à-vis all the organizations, policies and ideologies of the
bourgeoisie and the petty-bourgeoisie, which are its enemies.

On the other hand, the resumption of the class struggle will also have, as
history has shown, the power to attract the outbursts of anger provoked by
social despair among the petty-bourgeois layers and to frame them in the
revolutionary classist perspective, giving them a perspective not
ideological nor moral but concrete and material: it will not be a question
of saving souls or of attaining some beyond of peace and serenity
while in the lower world a bloody system of misery and injustice persists;
but to participate in the struggle to change the world and pave the way for
a rational social organization oriented towards satisfaction, not of market
demands, but of the needs of the entire human species.